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The Babadook
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There is no film genre that arouses generational
differences more than the horror genre. Each generation assumes that their
taste in horror is wider and better than the preceding generation’s taste – and
furthermore, that the taste of the subsequent generation of fans has become
degenerate and decadent.
Flashback to the late 1970s. “The best horror films
use suggestion, they inspire your imagination, they don’t show everything.
Off-screen events, shadows, atmospheric sounds – the masters, from F.W. Murnau
to Jacques Tourneur and Roman Polanski knew it!” I heard and read this bit of
received, assumed wisdom so many times from my “elders”, that I – and my entire
generation of cinephiles – knew it was time to revolt against it.
Yes, Nosferatu (1922), Cat People (1942), The Innocents (1961), Repulsion (1965) and so many others are classics,
incontestably great films. But do they offer the Last Word for All Time in
screen horror?
Of course not. So it was time for a changing of the
guard, both on the screen and in all forms of film criticism. The 1980s were
the decade of what Philip Brophy neologistically called horrality – horror and material textuality combined. That meant it
was the time for showing, for monstration, no longer merely suggesting.
So the graphic gore of Italian horror gialli, of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) and a horde of slasher
thrillers reclaimed its spectacular, subterranean history. Borders of taste
were pushed, redefined. Buried film histories – such as the one starting with
Herschell Gordon Lewis – were reclaimed (Noël Burch had already tried to redeem
this particular Lewis – not Jerry or Joseph – in the mid 1960s!). Cinema was
now seen to investigate the literal, the visceral, the blunt presentation of
trauma and death – and this, too, led to a new kind of imaginary, unconscious,
phantasmagoric horror (as I discussed, at the time, in my 1982 essay “Bodies in
Question”).
The genre went through other big changes after My Generation
embraced it. There was the postmodern horror of the self-conscious Scream movies (1996, 1997, 2000, 2011, then a TV series) spearheaded by Wes
Craven; and the so-called torture porn of the 2000s. I confess: I had steadily
lost most of my interest in this cinematic form by about 2005. So (as I
learned) had Philip Brophy!
By the time I saw the internationally successful
Australian film The Babadook – the
kind of small, energetic, skilful movie I would usually be predisposed to like
and defend – it irritated more than delighted me. Have I become just another
cranky, out-of-touch cinephile who grumbles that the true Golden Age of horror
cinema happened when I was 20 years old – when those wonderful heads exploded
in David Cronenberg’s indelible Scanners (1981)?
Let’s backtrack to 1980 and start over. That’s when I
wrote one of my first long, serious essays – on “Fantasy and Horror in
Australian Cinema”, in fact – and fell under the spell of a dazzling book of
textual theory: Tzvetan Todorov’s The
Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (which first appeared
in 1970). He brilliantly argues that fantasy narratives are classically based
on a hesitation between two kinds of
explanation or interpretation of events: a rational and a supernatural kind.
From Edgar Allan Poe to Hitchcock’s The
Birds (1963), the theory holds good.
But, starting in the 1980s, horror movies began
exploring a deliberate margin of incoherence, scrambling Todorov’s classical
template. From Scanners to Lynch’s Twin Peaks, a sudden, surprise inversion of the poles of
Good and Evil was usually enough to put our hesitation into a vertiginous,
undecidable spin. As it turned out, the 1960s-to-‘80s gialli, at their most delirious, were the precursors to this form
of cinematic mania, as well.
By the time of The
Babadook, however, this vertigo has become a type of opportunism. Jennifer
Kent’s film sets up at least three explanations for its horror. First, rational-psychological:
it’s all in the head of the mother, Amelia (vigorously played by Essie Davis).
Second, supernatural: there really is a bad spirit, and it’s especially honing
in on Amelia’s young son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman). Third, something in-between,
somewhere between the psychological and the spiritual: dead Dad (Ben Winspear
as Oskar) in the basement needs to be grieved. This third option – pitched as equally
real and metaphorical – has arisen in many films about the post-colonial
situation of indigenous populations, such as Tracey Moffatt’s Bedevil [1993].
The Babadook keeps hopping from
one level to the other, depending on which effect it needs: shock, pathos,
art-film resonance. But this is (for me, at least) too much hesitation, too
much equivocation; there is no centre to the movie, only endless switching. A
very similar problem afflicts Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper (2016) – about which, revealingly, the director
equivocates mightily whenever directly asked if he thinks ghosts are real … and
on which exact level they are real (modern hauntology,
à la Jacques Derrida, is a tricky business!).
It’s like in Peter Strickland’s over-celebrated Berberian Sound Studio (2012), where the
director’s desire to tarry in a space between giallo and a hyper-material, Peter Tscherkassky-style, avant-garde
deconstruction leads to another kind of opportunistic spinning-wheel. The
distinction between the real and surreal becomes no longer hesitant,
merely matter of blurry transitions. It’s all form, perception, hallucination … with no secure
ground on which to base any type of decent equivocation.
Modern horror cinema in the 2010s presents an
unsettling case where the aesthetic option of “anything goes” really has come
to limit possible artistic achievement.
© Adrian Martin April & September 2015 / July 2020 |
